Downed Trees, Power Lines Focus of Hurricane Irene Recovery

Most men who want to move their wife's car need only ask her for the keys.

Ray Salamone needed a friend to come with a chainsaw and remove a tree that fell across Myamby Road and onto his wife's Honda CR-V.

"I can't tell how much damage there is until I get it out from under the tree," Salamone said, looking at the tree.

County Executive Kevin Kamenetz said Sunday during a visit to a county highway shop in Towson that the county's primary focus was on the removal of trees from public property and roadways.

"Right now we're in recovery mode making sure we take care of a lot of downed trees," Kamenetz said. "Obviously power outages are the biggest problem."

Kamenetz said he spoke with the president of BGE about the situation.

"They are aware of our needs," Kamenetz said. "It's not going to get resolved immediately so we ask for residents to be patient."

Trees on power lines would be left to BGE crews, Kamenetz said.

The tree on the Salamone car fell around 11:30 p.m. taking electrical wires with it. The wires arced and caused a fire about 45 minutes later.

"The firefighters wouldn't do anything (about the tree) because electricity was involved," said Daphne Vasold, a neighbor who was cleaning storm debris from the front yard of her mother's home across the street from Salamone's car.

A second tree fell on the home next door to Vasold's mother.

Firefighters checked that home. No one was injured, Vasold said.

A third tree smashed a utility pole in the yard of Vasold's home three doors down the street.

"This is the worst we've ever had," Vasold said of the storm.

The trees were two of nearly 300 in Baltimore County alone felled by a combination of several inches of rain and high winds overnight Saturday and early Sunday morning, said Sean Vinson, a spokesman at the county's emergency operations center.

Kamanetz said toppled trees on private property would not be removed by the county.

"In those cases, we're asking residents to call their own insurance company or a private tree removal service," the county executive said.

The county also had to turn off the breakers for dozens of homes in the Cedar Beach area of eastern Baltimore County who use a grinder pump sewage removal system. The county said the brief disruption of service was necessary to avoid backups when power was restored to the area.

Some long-time county officials said the damage could have been much worse.

"I really think we dodged a bullet," said Tim Burgess, chief of the county Bureau of Highways. "It could have been much worse."

County officials said the trees and damaged powerlines are the major focus as recovery efforts move forward.

Approximately 623,000 of BGE's 1.2 million customers lost power because of the storm

About 171,000 customers had been restored and another nearly 452,000 remained without power as of about 5:45 p.m., according to BGE's website.

More than 143,000 of those were in Baltimore County—mostly in Towson and eastern portions of the county.

BGE has more than 3,800 employees, contractors and out-of-state workers to restore power. Exactly how long that will take isn't clear.

Linda Foy, a BGE spokeswoman, said the company isn't guaranteeing response times "because the situation is so fluid."

County officials said Hurricane Irene was different from Hurricane Isabel in 2003, which pushed through the area as a tropical storm and caused massive flooding.

"This isn't Isabel," said Ed Adams, long-time county public works director. "This is Floyd."

Isabel in 2003 tracked further west and pushed nearly 8 feet of storm surge up then Chesapeake into neighborhoods along the county's 200 miles of shoreline in Bowleys Quarters, Middle River, Essex and Dundalk.

Hurricane Floyd dumped nearly 14 inches of rain in some areas of Maryland and ended a drought. But the excessve rain and wind resulted in similar damage from fallen trees, Adams said.

Adams said cleaning up after Hurricane Irene is easier in some ways than the back-to-back 2010 blizzards sometimes referred to as Snowmageddon.

"When you have that kind of storm you have all this (damage) plus you have all that snow," Adams said.

As many as 18 deaths have been attributed to Hurricane Irene including a woman in Queen Anne's County.

No storm-related deaths have been reported in Baltimore County. A early Sunday morning that claimed the life of 77-year-old Marlene Miller was determined to have started because of discarded smoking materials and not the storm, Vinson said.

The hurricane will for more than 100,000 county children who were to return to classes Monday.

Burgess cautioned that more trees might fall over the next days and weeks.